A short history of electric vehicles

Few Americans realize the market competition between electric vehicles (EVs) and the internal combustion engine (ICE) began in the early 1800s. The first EV was developed in 1828 by Robert Anderson, but EVs didn’t become commercially practical until the 1870. Pictured below is of an early EV. Not much different from a carriage, the early EVs had the same advantages EVs have today, "they [were] quiet, easy to drive and didn’t emit smelly pollutants."

Pictured here is one of the first electric cars, an 1834 Baker

EVs were one-third of all cars on American roads in the early 1900s but, the disadvantages of heavy, lead-acid batteries with limited range needing constant recharging prevented EVs from gaining more market share. In 1912 Henry Ford began to mass produce the Model-T and EVs couldn’t compete with the low-cost vehicle. By 1920, the number of EVs on the road began to decline and by 1935 the EV all but disappeared from American roads. 

Fast forward to the 1960s and 1970s, when gasoline prices skyrocket, America began to rediscover EVs. In 1974, GM developed the modern, urban EV and by 1975 SebringVanguard became the sixth largest US automaker with its wedge-shaped Citicar that had a range of driving 50-60 miles on one electric charge. Again, limited range and performance caused interest in EVs to wane, but the lack of emissions and greenhouse gases (GHGs) would cause a market resurgence in the early 1990s.

So where did Linux come from?

Although programming of the Linux core started in 1991, the design concepts were based on the time-tested UNIX operating system. UNIX was developed at Bell Telephone Laboratories in the late 1960s. The original architects of UNIX, working back when there were few operating systems, wanted to create an operating system that shared data, programs, and resources both efficiently and securely — an ideal that wasn’t available then (and is still sought after now). From there, UNIX evolved into many different versions; its current family tree is so complicated that it looks like a kudzu infestation. In 1991, Linus Torvalds was a computer science student at the University of Helsinki in Finland. He wanted an operating system that was like the UNIX system that he’d grown fond of at the university, but both UNIX and the hardware it ran on were prohibitively expensive. 

A UNIX version called Minix was available for free, but it didn’t quite meet his needs. So, Torvalds studied Minix and then set out to write a new version himself. In his own words (recorded for posterity on the Internet because this was in an early version of an online chat room), his work was “just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like GNU.” Writing an operating system is no small task. Even after six months of hard work, Torvalds had made very little progress toward the general utility of the system. He posted what he had to the Internet — and found that many people shared his interest and curiosity. Before long, some of the brightest minds around the world were contributing to Linus’s project by adding enhancements or fixing bugs (errors in the code).